Site Mobile Navigation

City to Add Pre-K Efforts in Poor Areas Next Year

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Monday that the city would open a new type of preschool in Brooklyn next year, introducing a cradle-to-kindergarten approach to education for very young children in poor neighborhoods.

The school, known as Educare, will open in Brownsville and serve children between 6 weeks and 5 years old, mimicking schools that have been created in 17 other cities. The one envisioned for New York will include a “leadership institute” to carry out research in early childhood education, city officials said.

“Our goal is to have every city kid arrive in kindergarten ready and prepared for a lifetime of success,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at the New York Public Library, the site of a two-day education summit meeting hosted by NBC News.

It is a model, he said, that “has proven very effective in preparing academically at-risk children for success in the school, helping to close the achievement gap and break cycles of poverty.”

In a separate educational initiative, Schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott announced on Monday that the city would convert 4,000 half-day prekindergarten seats into full-day seats, mostly in poor neighborhoods next fall. While the city has roughly 60,000 seats for prekindergarteners, nearly half are half-day seats, which presents an obstacle for many working parents who cannot retrieve children at midday or afford hiring someone to do so. Full days are six and a half hours long.

Citywide, about 7,500 children who attended kindergarten this year were not enrolled in any public or private prekindergarten program last year, said Jocelyn Alter, an Education Department official who specializes in early childhood education.

“To have 7,500 children out there, not in prekindergarten, is 7,500 children who start off, on the first day of school, at a deficit,” the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said. “We can change that.” She said she hoped more Educare centers would eventually be created.

Most public school prekindergarten programs last only for the year before kindergarten, though other programs like Head Start exist for younger children.

At Educare, children are broken into classes by age group, Ms. Alter said. Staffing ratios are also set by age. Children will be exposed to linguistics to foster cognitive development, and their interaction will help build social development. For the youngest children, one of the first things teachers do is to hold them and talk to them while looking into their eyes, said Diana Mendley Rauner, the president of the Ounce of Prevention Fund, an early-learning advocacy organization.

“The very first way that children learn is through contact with adults in supportive, strong relationships where children are being attended to when they think about something and when they look out the window somebody points out what they’re looking at,” Dr. Rauner said. “That’s the foundation of literacy, but it’s also the foundation of curiosity, self-confidence, self-control and the ability to persist in hard tasks in school.”

Mr. Walcott said the city was proposing to house Educare at the current site of Public School 41. New facilities, including observation rooms, will be constructed there, he said. The center is preparing to enroll from 115 to 135 children.

To expand 4,000 prekindergarten seats to full-day seats, from half-day ones, will cost the city $20 million, officials said. The city will devote up to $10 million to setting up Educare, and private foundations will also contribute.

Educare centers around the country are financed by several family foundations, including the Buffett Early Childhood Fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, though those sources have not yet been identified as contributors for the city.

The operational costs of the school have not yet been determined, since the model is still being put into place. But those costs will be covered by existing federal and state grant programs, with another 20 percent streaming in from private donations, Education Department officials said.

A version of this article appears in print on September 25, 2012, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: City to Add Pre-K Efforts In Poor Areas Next Year. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe